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Richard Baxter (1615-91) was one of the leading Puritan divines and the author of devotional classics such as The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650). His famous ministry to the people of Kidderminster was marked by a deep and spontaneous human sympathy; he saw people suffer and his soul wept. None, said Baxter, should perish for want of hearing that Christ died for them. In his address to the Puritan Conference in 1959, Dr D. Martvn Lloyd-Jones was certain that when we speak of Baxter at Kidderminster we are entitled to speak of revival.

In his informative and provocative portrait, Alan Clifford places Baxter in the social and intellectual milieu of his age. He evokes the drama of the Civil War and examines Baxter’s support for the Parliamentary cause. At the same time he offers a muscular dissection of his subject’s theology. Dr Clifford asks whether the denigration of Baxter even to the present day is a result of valid judgements on the man and his thought, or the product of a skewed understanding. As he did in his acclaimed study of the Welsh preacher John Jones Talsarn, Dr Clifford shows himself freely in his book. If the evangelical renewal of the late 1950s had favoured Baxter over John Owen, he writes: Evangelism would have been warmer and less inhibited, holiness more evidently fruitful, and biblical church unity more fervently pursued.

With clashes of conviction and emotion on every page, Dr Clifford illuminates a fast-moving story with careful selections from the writings of Baxter, his supporters and his critics.

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A man has married his pet snake because he believes his dead girlfriend came back to life as the cobra. The snake was spotted by the man in South East Asia, who said it bore a ‘striking resemblance’ to his former lover. He and the 10ft serpent now spend every day together watching TV, sharing romantic picnics by the lake, playing board games and going to the gym as a couple.

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Calvin wrote to Geneva on November 12, 1540, as follows:—‘Magnificent, mighty, and honourable Lords, were it only for the courtesy with which you treat me, it would be my duty to endeavour to meet your wishes. But there is, besides, the singular love which I bear to your church, which God once committed to my care, so that I am for ever bound to promote its good and its salvation. Nevertheless, be so good as to remember that I am here at Worms for the purpose of serving, with what small ability God has given me, all Christian churches. For this reason I am, for the present, unable to come and serve you.’*

He would have his mind changed. Geneva wanted him back and apparently so did God. And you can’t resist God…

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*J. H. Merle D’aubigné D.D. and William L. R. Cates, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin (vol. 7; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1876), 12–13.